Case Study on an Investigation of Information Security Management among Law Firms

The integrity of lawyers trust accounts as come under scrutiny in the last few years. There have been many incidents of trust account fraud reported internationally, including a case in Australia, where an employee of a law firm stole $4,500,000 from the trust funds of forty-two clients. Our study involved interviewing principles of ten law companies to find out solicitors’ attitudes to computer security and the possibility of breaches of their trust accounts. An overall finding highlights that law firms were not current with technology to combat computer crime, and inadequate access control was a major concern in safeguarding account data. Our conclusions revealed the urgent need for law firms to adopt security controls, implement information security policies and procedures and obtain cooperation from management to communicate these policies to staff

A critical review on the rationality of popular failure criteria for composites

Popular failure criteria for fibre reinforced composites are subjected to critical scrutiny on their rationality. The rationality of a theory is about the mathematical and physical logic underlying the theory, rather than the closeness of their results in comparison with experimental data. Seeking for close comparisons with a set of experimental data before obtaining a basic level of rationality is not a scientific attitude, although the practice is becoming the norm in the community of science and engineering. A theory lacking of rationality can never be a sound one no matter how closely it compares with experimental data in one respect or another, since a good comparison in one respect comes at a price of poor agreement in some other respects usually, either unknown for the time being or hidden deliberately. The objective of this paper to raise the awareness of rationality, or the lack of it, in existing theories so that the users will be warned to exercise their judgement on the applicability of these theories before employing them in future. It should also help the researchers avoid incorporating illogical considerations into the formulations of the new theories they are developing

Studying SCADA Organisations Information Security Goals: An Integrated System Theory Approach

Security awareness and its implementation within an organisation is crucial for preventing deliberate attacks or/and minimise system failures on organisation’s system especially where critical infrastructure is involved including energy, water, gas and etc. This study is based on Integrated System Theory (IST) and focuses on measuring and assessing security goals including policies, risk management, internal control and contingency management implemented in 101 organisations that operate Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) Systems. The data collected were analysed using structural equation modelling to test the structural and measurement model. The major finding of this study is that organisational information security goals are strongly related to the key measurement indicators, which include items assessing security policies, risk management, internal controls and contingency management

On understanding the applicability of Mohr-Coulomb failure hypothesis for composite materials using UnitCells©

The applicability of Mohr-Coulomb (M-C) failure hypothesis for anisotropic composite materials is re-examined in this paper. Mohr-Coulomb failure theory has been widely referred to in the literature to study the failure of unidirectional (UD) fibre reinforced composites under transverse loading including the renowned Puck’s criteria. This has been partially validated based on the experimental correlations with the predictions made by the M-C criterion for a few set of test cases, which remains a debatable way of formulating composites failure criterion. It is brought to attention that Mohr utilised the concept of principal stresses in constructing principal circles and assumed that the outermost circle represents the critical state of failure. This hypothesis and its derivative “failure is dictated by the stresses acting on the fracture surface” have thus been used for formulating the criterion for isotropic materials that exhibit brittle fracture characteristics. However, the concept of principal stresses is not employable in the analysis of composites. Hence, the same hypothesis may not be applicable in studying composite materials. Also, the micromechanical aspects that lead to failure have not been taken into consideration in this hypothesis which can lead to incorrect predictions in the case of composite materials. The capability of an appropriately representative unit cell model in better understanding the micromechanical aspects and the implications of the hypothesis is studied by attempting micromechanical analysis of UD composites through UnitCells© tool. It is utilised to locate stress concentrations within the unit cell from which the likely angle of the fracture surface can be identified. It has also been shown that the stress concentrations could help locate the fracture angle for UD composite materials as a sufficient but not a necessary requirement due to the presence of non-linear behaviour before fracture. If one wishes to employ M-C failure hypothesis to formulate a failure criterion, the assumption that the failure is determined by the stresses exposed on fracture surface has to be made with caution

Privacy Preservation Intrusion Detection Technique for SCADA Systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems face the absence of a protection technique that can beat different types of intrusions and protect the data from disclosure while handling this data using other applications, specifically Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The SCADA system can manage the critical infrastructure of industrial control environments. Protecting sensitive information is a difficult task to achieve in reality with the connection of physical and digital systems. Hence, privacy preservation techniques have become effective in order to protect sensitive/private information and to detect malicious activities, but they are not accurate in terms of error detection, sensitivity percentage of data disclosure. In this paper, we propose a new Privacy Preservation Intrusion Detection (PPID) technique based on the correlation coefficient and Expectation Maximisation (EM) clustering mechanisms for selecting important portions of data and recognizing intrusive events. This technique is evaluated on the power system datasets for multiclass attacks to measure its reliability for detecting suspicious activities. The experimental results outperform three techniques in the above terms, showing the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed technique to be utilized for current SCADA systems

A critical review on the rationality of popular failure criteria for composites

Popular failure criteria for fibre reinforced composites are subjected to critical scrutiny on their rationality. The rationality of a theory is about the mathematical and physical logic underlying the theory, rather than the closeness of their results in comparison with experimental data. Seeking for close comparisons with a set of experimental data before obtaining a basic level of rationality is not a scientific attitude, although the practice is becoming the norm in the community of science and engineering. A theory lacking of rationality can never be a sound one no matter how closely it compares with experimental data in one respect or another, since a good comparison in one respect comes at a price of poor agreement in some other respects usually, either unknown for the time being or hidden deliberately. The objective of this paper to raise the awareness of rationality, or the lack of it, in existing theories so that the users will be warned to exercise their judgement on the applicability of these theories before employing them in future. It should also help the researchers avoid incorporating illogical considerations into the formulations of the new theories they are developing

An excursion into representative volume elements and unit cells

The objective of this chapter is to provide a comprehensive and systematic account on the subject of representative volume elements (RVEs) and unit cells (UCs). To construct an RVE or UC, intuition has been often perceived sufficient to facilitate the analysis, but down to the details, approaches taken turn out to be rather mythological. It will be demonstrated in this chapter that there is absolutely no room for any myth on the subject if the basic concepts of mathematics and mechanics, viz. symmetry and free body diagrams, have been applied correctly and consistently. Only then, effective and reliable means of material characterisation based on the use of RVEs and UCs can be established, in particular, for composites where micro/mesostructures often dictate their behaviours. The logic employed defines the boundary of applicability of the methodology

The Formulation of the Quadratic Failure Criterion for Transversely Isotropic Materials: Mathematical and Logical Considerations

The quadratic function of the original Tsai–Wu failure criterion for transversely isotropic materials is re-examined in this paper. According to analytic geometry, two of the troublesome coefficients associated with the interactive terms—one between in-plane direct stresses and one between transverse direct stresses—can be determined based on mathematical and logical considerations. The analysis of the nature of the quadratic failure function in the context of analytic geometry enhances the consistency of the failure criterion based on it. It also reveals useful physical relationships as intrinsic properties of the quadratic failure function. Two clear statements can be drawn as the outcomes of the present investigation. Firstly, to maintain its basic consistency, a failure criterion based on a single quadratic failure function can only accommodate five independent strength properties, viz. the tensile and compressive strengths in the directions along fibres and transverse to fibres, and the in-plane shear strength. Secondly, amongst the three transverse strengths—tensile, compressive and shear—only two are independent